After Alexander's death, the city passed to successive Hellenistic rulers and was briefly an independent kingdom until 129 BC, when it came under Roman rule.

A series of natural disasters and repeated pirate attacks wreaked havoc on the area, and the city lost its importance by the time of the Byzantine era.

After the conquest of Rhodes by Suleiman the Magnificent in 1522, the town fell under Ottoman control as the Knights Hospitaller relocated to Europe.

The suffix -ασσός (-assos) of Greek Ἁλικαρνᾱσσός is indicative of a substrate toponym, meaning that an original non-Greek name influenced or established the place's name.

Halicarnassus was founded by Dorian Greeks, and the figures on its coins, such as the head of Medusa, Athena, Poseidon, and the trident, support the statement that the mother cities were Troezen and Argos.

[8] The inhabitants appear to have accepted Anthes, a son of Poseidon, as their legendary founder, as mentioned by Strabo, and were proud of the title Antheadae.

Little is known of Pisindalis, her son and successor; but Lygdamis, the tyrant of Halicarnassus, who next attained power, is notorious for having the poet Panyasis put to death and forcing Herodotus, possibly the most well-known Halicarnassian, to leave his native city (c. 457 BC).

Under the Persians, it was the capital city of the satrapy of Caria, the region that long afterward constituted its hinterland and of which it was the principal port.

When he died in 353 BC, Artemisia II of Caria, who was both his sister and his widow, employed the ancient Greek architects Satyros, Pythis, and the sculptors Bryaxis, Scopas, Leochares, and Timotheus to build a monument and a tomb, known as Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, for him.

Alexander the Great laid siege to the city after his arrival in the Carian lands and, together with his ally, Queen Ada of Caria, captured it after fighting in 334 BC.

A series of earthquakes destroyed much of the city, as well as the great Mausoleum, while repeated pirate attacks from the Mediterranean wreaked further havoc on the area.

By the time of the early Christian Byzantine era, when Halicarnassus was an important bishopric, there was little left of the shining city of Mausolus.

[citation needed] In 1522, Suleiman the Magnificent conquered the base of the Crusader knights on the island of Rhodes, who then relocated first briefly to Sicily and later permanently to Malta, leaving the Castle of Saint Peter and Bodrum to the Ottoman Empire.

In her book Bodrum, Fatma Mansur points out that the presence of a large community of bilingual Cretan Turks, coupled with the conditions of free trade and access to the southern Dodecanese islands until 1935, made the town less provincial.

[13] The fact that traditional agriculture was not a very rewarding activity in the rather dry peninsula also prevented the formation of a class of large landowners.

A first nucleus of intellectuals started to form after the 1950s around the writer Cevat Şakir Kabaağaçlı, who first came here in exile two decades previously and was charmed by the town to the point of adopting the pen name Halikarnas Balıkçısı ('The Fisherman of Halicarnassus').

The castle was built by the Knights Hospitaller during the 15th century, and the walls of the fortification contain pieces of the ruins of the Mausoleum, which was used as a source of construction materials.

The Castle of Bodrum retains its original design and character of the Knights' period and reflects Gothic architecture.

The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus was a tomb designed by Greek architects and built for Mausolus, a satrap of the Persian Empire, and his sister-wife Artemisia II of Caria.

After his death, the house in Bodrum where he lived during the later years of his life was transformed into the Zeki Müren Art Museum by order of the Ministry of Culture and was opened to the public on June 8, 2000.

[40] There are 56 neighbourhoods in Bodrum District:[41] During the 20th century, the city's economy was mainly based on fishing and sponge diving.

[46] The Carian Trail, which passes by Bodrum and the surrounding Kızılağaç and Pedasa ruins, attracts hikers from both inside and outside Turkey.

[47] Traditional Bodrum houses are characterized by their prismatic shapes, simple designs and locally sourced building materials like stone, wood, clay and cane.

Blue is also believed by locals to protect against the malicious effects of envy (similar to the Anatolian belief Nazar, originated in Mesopotamia).

Due to financial and legal problems caused by a landownership dispute, the airport was sold to Presidency of Defense Industries in 1997.

[57] The word derives from the Turkish for "full" or "stuffed", as these shared taxis depart from the terminal only when a sufficient number of passengers have boarded.

The ruling party AKP has been criticized in the media for giving building permits to construct new hotels on burnt and deforested areas.

[66][67] Wild boars and foxes are prevalent in the area, as are other animals such as pygmy cormorants, Dalmatian pelicans and lesser kestrels.